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The candidate of the Labour Party (LP) in the February 25, 2023 presidential election, Peter Obi, has challenged the Federal Government to give Nigerians details of how funds realised from the removal of petrol subsidy are being spent.
Obi, who was a guest at an online
Twitter space tagged, ‘Peter Obi Live on Parallel Facts’ in the late evening of
Saturday, July 29, considered subsidy removal as an economic decision that must
be thought through before the government embarked on it.
The Bola Ahmed Tinubu
administration had removed the subsidy
on the cost of petrol to tackle, among other things, corruption in the system
and save money for the government. But Obi was unconvinced, saying the
appropriation of gains from the removal itself was corruption-ridden.
He said, “Nigerians need to see
the numbers and figures from the savings made from subsidy. Petrol subsidy in
Nigeria is more like a criminal set-up. You cannot tell people to make
sacrifices when they’re seeing you live a life of a rock star, and buying brand
new jeeps from all over the world at very expensive prices.”
Obi, telling Nigerians he would
have done things differently in subsidy removal, said, “It has to be structured
in phases, so that the government knows the actual subsidy component it is
dealing with.”
He maintained there remained so
much corruption in the oil sector, and the Federal government needed to know
each component of oil subsidy it was dealing with.
“For example when you remove all
these opaque components, what you would be paying could even be 40 per cent or
less. It is when you know the component of what you’re removing that you can
take a wholistic and proper action.
“We have seen a former governor
(Isah Yuguda) say that someone is so tired of making money from subsidy
corruption that he had made enough. I don’t think I have ever seen someone who
said he had made enough money.
“For someone to say that he had
made enough money through fraud subsidy payment, that would give you a sense of
the kind of corruption we are dealing with,” Obi said.
He expressed concerns about the
poor state of the nation’s refineries, adding that modular refineries were not
getting supply of crude oil.
On the agonies Nigerians are
experiencing in the aftermath of the fuel subsidy removal, he said, “There is a
number of things that we need to do to help in managing the situation and
lessen the burden of the policies on the people. We also need to discuss with
stakeholders to make it better.”
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